By now you’ve seen the doctored photograph, which illustrates how Vancouver city hall intends to provide more affordable housing through its “thin-street” initiative by stretching a number of city blocks in the West End, Marpole and Grandview-Woodland neighbourhoods with the construction of housing on underused wisps of taxpayer-owned real estate such as side boulevards and wide roads.

It’s part of the densification trial balloon floated recently by the 18-member Affordable Housing Task Force, which began meeting last December and was back in council Tuesday and which was charged with finding creative, holistic ways to boost the population of Vancouver with more affordable housing opportunities for those who want to live west of Boundary Road even though their low- and middle-income budgets suggest otherwise.

The goal is also more condominiums, apartments, row houses and townhomes along busy traffic arteries, such as Main, Fraser, Dunbar and Hastings streets.

Task force members and enthusiasts say the addition of more housing, especially more rental units, will ease the availability and affordability crunch in a city where the so-called average buyer, and in many cases, renter, has been priced out of the market.

The task force wants to see 10,000 new units, preferably close to bus routes and SkyTrain stations.

Not surprisingly, the NIMBYists are aghast, citing increased traffic congestion, overloaded infrastructure systems and the folly of paving a paradise that can’t be recouped. They blame developers and tax-hungry city bureaucrats for the densification push and, quite rightly, wonder aloud just how much these “affordable” new homes and rental units will cost.

And then there’s a completely contrary view.

When I first began house hunting, in 1984, I was a native Vancouverite who had spent my youth romping in the open fields of south Vancouver, who considered Victoria Drive the centre of my universe and who watched my parents party in the rec room of a bungalow on Commercial Drive and then a bigger, statelier Tudor house on East 45th Avenue.

It came as something of a shock to me that I wouldn’t be continuing that Vancouver legacy.

I couldn’t afford it. The housing budget of the Fralic household nearly 30 years ago — one husband, one wife, one school-age son and one newborn daughter — was in the low $100,000s, typical of couples our age making our first foray into the market.

We weren’t even that fussy. Didn’t need fancy countertops or appliances, or polished wood floors, or a landscaped yard. Just a place that felt like home, that we could fix up and grow into.

But after numerous disappointing walk-throughs of dumps on the city’s east side, it quickly became clear that the dream of owning a single-family home, at least one suitable for a young family, within the city limits of Vancouver was out of our reach.

So we moved to the suburbs.

Ours wasn’t a singular story of the day — all around us, our friends and co-workers and relatives were discovering the same thing, and were upping stakes from their family homes in Vancouver for all parts south, north and east, to Surrey and Burnaby and Richmond and Port Coquitlam and North Vancouver, where the land and houses were roomy and plentiful, where the prices were not breathtaking and the commute a lesser evil than being house poor.

Which is why all this earnest effort to provide affordable housing in Vancouver is such a puzzle.

When did Vancouver become so special? When was it decided that people had a right to live in Vancouver? What makes our big city so different from other major growing cities of the world? Consider that if you didn’t buy years ago, or manage to snag an affordable rental when such a thing existed, or inherit your parents’ estate in increasingly pricey places like Manhattan or Paris or London or Los Angeles or even Toronto, then you did what you had to do. You headed to the outskirts, to gasp, the suburbs.

Yes, a livable city should be a place for everyone — for young and old, for rich and poor. But should it be artificially engineered because we feel bad that someone earning $30,000 can’t afford to live in Dunbar?

And when does all this effort to make Vancouver livable ultimately make it unlivable, make it too crowded and too overbuilt?

Given the option, I’m not sure I would move back into Vancouver even if I could afford it.

I like it out here in New Westminster, where the mayor doesn’t hate cars, where I know my neighbours by name, where the small-town feel hasn’t changed much in years.

Back in 1984, I was forced to face facts, and one of those was that my family didn’t expect city hall to rescue us from economic reality.

Can’t afford to live in Vancouver? Then do what thousands of us have done.

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